SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. -- It was an interesting bit of luck this week when I bumped into Oregon offensive coordinator Mark Helfrich, who was minding his own business and just sitting around. OK. Maybe that's overstating the interaction. Helfrich was obligated to sit tethered to a table as part of the Fiesta Bowl media day on Monday. Literally, the poor guy couldn't get up to use the restroom if he wanted. So I closed in.

Let's call Helfrich what he was: A sitting duck.

We made some small talk about Helfrich's age (39) and discussed how elaborate the Ducks offense might be in the hands of a quarterback who knew the offense as well as his coaches (Marcus Mariotta does not, yet). And ultimately, we got down to business -- Is Helfrich going to be Oregon's head coach next season or what?

It's become the question to ask around this Fiesta Bowl with seven NFL head coaches fired on Monday, and media outlets in those cities dispatching reporters to this bowl game to talk with Chip Kelly. It's pretty much a foregone conclusion that anyone in his right mind would choose to pursue a lucrative financial windfall, a profile boost and a job coaching the best football players on the planet over, say, being dragged by his athletic director to a hearing with the NCAA committee on infractions.

Kelly has just delivered Oregon to four consecutive Bowl Championship Series appearances. He's done about all he can do in Eugene. With all that success, with NCAA sanctions likely looming, and with the rest of the conference seemingly closing the gap on Oregon, it feels like Kelly and his agent, David Dunn, will conduct an IPO stock offering to the NFL while his coaching valuation is still sky high.

Where's Kelly going? That's not the right question. He'll have his pick, and Dunn is masterful. Philly? Cleveland? $5 million a year? $6 million? Who knows? Nothing is out. I wouldn't even close the door on Kelly somehow ending up in New England in some odd twist with coach and three-time Super Bowl champion head coach Bill Belichick moving strictly to a general manager role if the Patriots' postseason broke just the right way.

There's nothing left in Eugene for Kelly to prove. But there are questions all around Helfrich. Forget whether Kelly's offense would work in the NFL; nobody really knows what kind of head coach Helfrich might be, nobody knows how much of Kelly's offense he'd run, nobody knows how much would change culturally at Oregon, or if key boosters might push for Boise State's Chris Petersen as Kelly's successor. And yet, Helfrich feels like the right choice all the way.

Helfrich would love to be a head coach someday. He's said as much in previous conversations. But Kelly's offensive coordinator played it brilliantly when he told me on Monday, "I've never sat down and said, 'I have to (be a head coach) someday or I'm going to be incomplete.' I love my job. We live in a great place and have great players. Certainly there's been a lot of hub-bub here recently. I think every single guy on our staff has been offered a quote-unquote better job during our tenure."

There's been only one golden rule inside the Oregon athletic department in the past four years: What Chip wants, Chip gets. So much so that when there was a shuffling of the athletic department media relations duties last year, Kelly asserted himself to keep those who had been working with him in the first couple of seasons right where they are. He wants his people around him. He'll want that in the NFL, too. Also, it's no secret that when Kelly flirted with Tampa Bay last January, he did so believing, maybe naively, that Helfrich would be his successor at Oregon.

This is the real wild card. Oregon might not want to be viewed as the program that lost its head coach to the NFL, got disciplined by the NCAA for actions during his tenure, and also, let him pick his successor. That's the seat Helfrich sits in today. And there's not a thing he can do to fix it.

I don't care where Kelly ends up in the NFL. You shouldn't either. What matters more is where Oregon goes with its next big decision at head coach. The transition from Mike Bellotti to Kelly feels like it fell into place almost by accident, as some brilliant happenstance. In that, the Ducks' BCS story is a little Slumdog Millionaire. The next transition, though, needs to be more calculated.

Nobody knows exactly how much of the Ducks play-calling Helfrich is doing during games. I'm not sure how he'd be with the boosters who matter most at UO. I don't know, or care, if he's media savvy. But what's clear to me is that Helfrich gives Oregon its best chance to maintain the run its on right now, regardless of what the NCAA does. And I keep coming back to the fact that if Kelly weren't viewed as so transient and NFL-bound that Helfrich would have been the leading candidate at Cal and Colorado and a host of other places last month.